Reform, Conservative and Orthodox
are labels used by any Jew who mocks
another, by implying that he mocks
another’s view of dei’s vox
as being lazy, hazy, even crazy.
Unlike answers that were rejected by Daisy Daisy,
those given to Jews aren’t always outer spacey
when given to questions that aren’t as hazy
as those of most of their opponents when they disagree
with them, sadly disinclined to see
the differences in Jewish identity
like those of bicycles when they’re made for three.
In ““Birthright” and “Giant” Tackle Jewish Identity: The plays explore interpersonal rifts over Israel, but only one lets the ugliness linger,” New Yorker, 7/9/26, Emily Nussbaum writes:
The Oakland-based playwright Jonathan Spector wrote “Birthright”—his warm, haimish, ultimately frustrating new drama—on a dare. Weeks after October 7, 2023, Spector was “cajoled” by a peer to dig into the generational fracture among American Jews, a split that deepened precipitously after the catastrophes in Israel and Gaza.
At first, Spector said no. Who could blame him? The risks included glibness and finger-wagging, not to mention the danger suggested by the metal detectors outside the production now at M.C.C. “Birthright”: talking across divides, keeping the conversation going. I, too, am frustrated by the online reflex to sneer. But those ideals block the play from being fully honest—by letting ugliness stick around.
“Birthright” culminates in a fiery showdown in Act III, when the left-wing Izzy and the liberal Chaya wield phones like knives, competitively Googling “Theodor Herzl colonialism” and “1930s partition plan Israel” as Noah struggles to talk them down. The moment has a trace of Aaron Sorkin; I usually mean this as an insult, but in Spector’s case it’s not all bad. Everyone—including Alona, the only one who’s lived in Israel—gets to make their case in full, just as the anti-vaxxers did in “Eureka Day.” But is it enough to hear people out?
To retreat to “It’s complicated”?
I kept sensing the elisions. We hear about MAGA Zionists—Fox News-watching fathers, Tel Aviv neighbors—but they’re all offstage. By design, this is a play about a narrow slice of Ashkenazic Jews, college-educated members of Conservative shuls.
(This isn’t a political category; it’s the middle of the continuum of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox, or, as the joke goes, “lazy, hazy, and crazy.”) It’s a play about two-state Zionists resistant to the term “genocide” and anti-Zionists pushing them to use it, a demographic just left of the women from the hilarious “JAP Battle” rap track, from the TV show “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” who spar over their anti-racist bona fides, then add, politely, “Though of course I support Israel.” Yet “Birthright,” despite having been written, daringly, into the current crisis, feels one step behind.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
